Adjective phrase

Adverbial phrase

An adverbial phrase is built round an adverb by adding words before and/or after it, for example:

The economy recovered veryslowly.

They wanted to leave the country as fast as possible.

Prepositional phrase

In a prepositional phrase the preposition always comes at the beginning, for example:

I longed to live nearthe sea.

The dog was hiding underthe kitchen table.

Of course, we also use the word phrase to refer to a short group of words that have a particular meaning when they are used together, such as rain cats and dogs, play for time, or a square meal. This type of phrase is often referred to as an idiom.